How do temporary spells of absence from work affect individuals' labor trajectory? To answer this question, we augment a 'wage ladder' model, in which individuals receive alternative take-it-or-leave-it wage offers from firms and potentially suffer accidents which may push them into temporary...

We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Goeteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the...

In this paper, we examine whether the expansion of health insurance coverage brought on by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), led to a decline in absenteeism among overweight and obese individuals. We use data from the National Health Insurance Survey (NHIS) to compare...

This paper makes use of the randomized allocation of workers on sick leave in Denmark into self-management support, to examine the role of beliefs about control for prolonged absenteeism due to illness. Our results demonstrate that the ability of the intervention to lead sick-listed workers...

This paper analyzes the relationship between commuting time and sick-day absence of US workers. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the years 2011, 2013, and 2015, we find that a 1% increase in the daily commute of male workers is associated with an increase of around 0.018%...

We investigate the impact of sickness absenteeism on productivity by using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian private firms. We deal with endogeneity, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of the Ackerberg...

Student absences are a potentially important, yet understudied, input in the educational process. Using longitudinal data from a nationally-representative survey and rich administrative records from North Carolina, we investigate the relationship between student absences and academic...

While existing research supports that participation in high-school athletics is associated with better education and labour-market outcomes, the mechanisms through which these benefits accrue are not well established. We use data from a large public-school district to retrieve an estimate of the...

In many countries, general practitioners (GPs) are assigned the task of controlling the validity of their own patients' insurance claims. At the same time, they operate in a market where patients are customers free to choose their GP. Are these roles compatible? Can we trust that the gatekeeping...

Using two nationally representative datasets from household surveys conducted in India in 2005 and 2012, the present paper examines the causal effect of gender in private school choice. We argue that the gender of the child is potentially endogenous in India because parents continue to have...